Expect increase in online ads

Is the Internet about to come into its own as a valuable marketing medium?  Highlights from the Economist's Online Ad Attack from the Blog Business Summit, Blogs, traditional sites taking eyeballs (and ad revenues) away from television.

Advertising Age says the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC, and the internet has become the fastest growing advertising medium. ZenithOptimedia says ad revenue on the internet grew by 21% in 2004 and that we can expect that type of growth to continue.  As we mentioned in a prior post, they describe how Google advertisers will now be able to select the specific sites where they want their ads to appear, and advertisers can now pay for ads by impression. Google will now also offer animated ads.  Yahoo’s Terry Semel says the opportunity for growth is significant. Many firms allocate only 2-4% of their marketing budgets to the internet while it represents about 15% of consumers’ media consumption. 

Boing Boing, one of my favorite sites, is already making $40,000/month in ad revenue according to BusinessWeek's new blogspotting blog